Overview
First published in 1987, The New Eighteenth Century (now with a new preface by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown) examines eighteenth century English literature’s resistance to the application of new theoretical approaches and presents new work by leading scholars which both challenges this resistance and demonstrates the usefulness of feminist, Marxist, new-historicist, and psychoanalytic approaches to the analysis of eighteenth-century texts. This book reinterprets and resituates canonical works (by such writers as Fielding, Goldsmith, and Sterne) but also explores areas and figures increasingly important to eighteenth-century study. It opens questions about the canon and about the nature of ""canonicity"" itself as it considers texts by women, working-class literature, guidebooks for bourgeois tourists, and aspects of the cultural and social terrain including problems of race and colonialism, capitalism, and penal institutions. The New Eighteenth Century not only provides new ways of looking at the literature of the period but serves as a model for future work in eighteenth-century studies.
Full Product Details
Author: Felicity Nussbaum ,
Laura Brown
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
Weight: 0.780kg
ISBN: 9781041015154
ISBN 10: 1041015151
Pages: 330
Publication Date: 01 May 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Review of the first publication: ‘The New Eighteenth Century is an undeniably important book…I shall assign it to my students in eighteenth-century courses and seminars. If I could, I would assign it to all of my colleagues in the field.’ — Jerry C. Beasley, University of Delaware
Author Information
Felicity A. Nussbaum, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, has published Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre and The Arabian Nights in Historical Context with Saree Makdisi, among other books. A former president of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, she has held NEH, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships. She is currently writing plays on Hester Thrale Piozzi and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Laura Brown is the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell. She has served as President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. And she is the author of seven books—engaging variously with drama and performance, women and imperialist ideology, sewers and oceans, lapdogs and monkeys, and now earthquakes, storms, and what she is calling the eco-other in eighteenth-century literature. The latter is the topic of her most recent book, The Counterhuman Imaginary: Earthquakes, Lapdogs, and Traveling Coinage in Eighteenth-Century Literature, published in 2023.
